Family sells cherished home, closing door on lifetime of memories

By Carolyn Said, San Francisco Chronicle
Dozens of strangers tromped through the dilapidated Victorian on Folsom Street that the Mosqueda family had owned for the past half century. They peered into each closet, scoped out the crumbling brick-and-mortar foundation, and scrambled up the steep steps leading to the ramshackle apartment over the garage.
Upstairs, Juan “Johnny” Mosqueda, 49, the youngest of the 10 Mosqueda siblings, did his best to ignore the house hunters and real estate agents as he watched a World Cup match with his daughter and grandson.
“I was born a few months after my parents bought this house,” he said. “I’ve lived here my whole life. It will feel strange to leave the neighborhood after all these years.”
Still, he said, selling it was the right thing for his family. “We all decided this is the best way,” he said.
It was, after all, the only way.
The Mosqueda clan’s father, Jesus, had died six months earlier at age 84, and their mother, Margarita, at age 77 in 2011. None of their 10 children, from Johnny the baby to Maria, who at 61 is shouldering the mantle of family matriarch, could afford to buy out their siblings. In fact none of them — except Johnny, who’d stayed with his parents — still lived in the Mission District. They’d all long since scattered to far-flung suburbs, from Antioch to Stockton.
“Most of the Hispanic families in the neighborhood who have been here a long time can stay because they own their home,” said the Rev. Tom Seagrave, 72, the family’s longtime parish priest. “But their children and grandchildren can’t afford to live here anymore.”
The Mission is no longer an entry point for working-class families like theirs. Instead, the median values in their neighborhood were now north of a million dollars — and their own house was listed for $999,000 and likely to go for even more.
“A million dollars!” Maria marveled. “My parents wouldn’t believe it.”
Jesus and Margarita had scrimped and saved to buy the house for about $20,000 — $153,500 in today’s dollars — with money from backbreaking labor as migrant farm workers, along with help from relatives in their native Mexico and a usurious loan from a real estate agent.
All the Mosqueda siblings have vivid memories of early mornings when their parents bundled them, barely awake, into the back of a beat-up station wagon. They would drive to Menlo Park to pick cherries, to Gilroy for onions and green beans, or to Salinas for lettuce and broccoli.
“My father told me, ‘You’ve got two good hands; you can use them,’” Maria said of those days in the 1950s and 1960s. She and her sisters took turns babysitting for the siblings too young to work.
Jesus and Margarita had met in the cotton fields in Mendota (Fresno County), where Maria was born. After a few years living in shacks in Gilroy and Stockton — “what I remember most is the rats,” Maria says — they landed in a San Francisco rental and found they preferred city life.
The family continued doing farmwork on weekends, holidays and summertime for several years after buying the Folsom house. During the school year, Jesus worked as a day laborer in Daly City before getting into the union as a journeyman welder at the Hunters Point Shipyard. That was a turning point — no more farmwork — and something all the Mosquedas mention with pride.
Still, to make ends meet, all 12 Mosquedas, plus a cousin, crammed into the downstairs one-bedroom apartment. They rented the upstairs unit to a family of four; another couple leased a garage apartment that Jesus built. In all, 19 people lived in the modest triplex.
Some would-be buyers were daunted by how much work the house needed. There had been very little maintenance over the years, and all of those bodies left a mark on the place.
Others saw obvious potential.
“The land alone is worth more than the asking price,” said Diane Levin, an agent with Better Homes & Gardens.
But the house is no tear-down. Any buyer would opt to do a studs-up renovation of the existing structures, rather than enter into San Francisco’s byzantine process for permitting a new dwelling, several real estate agents said.
Eventually, the Mosquedas received four offers. They picked the top one, $1.3 million.
The money, split 10 ways after paying off a home equity loan for their parents’ medical bills, will prove a boon for the siblings.
Maria will fix up her house and take a vacation. Ofelia will have the down payment to buy a home in Oakdale (Stanislaus County). Carolina will have a cushion for extra expenses when she gets her long-awaited kidney transplant. Johnny will pay off debts.
On a sunny Saturday in August, the whole family gathered with friends and neighbors — many of them now related by marriage — for a final fiesta at the house. Rarely taking a breath, Maria was everywhere at the goodbye party, serving food, busing dishes, reminiscing with guests, and joining assorted sisters and nieces for an impromptu salsa dance and conga line.
“This is truly a gift,” Maria said of the money each will receive. “I tell them to use it wisely.”
“My mother’s last wish was that I try to keep the family together. I will do my best.”